1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an advertisement distribution management apparatus, an advertisement distribution system, and an advertisement distribution management method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Along with the rapid spread of the Internet in recent years, advertisement distribution via the Internet has been conducted frequently. For example, conducted is the advertisement distribution in which advertising content such as businesses and goods is displayed in an advertising space defined in an advertising medium (a web page, for example), and when such an advertising content is clicked, the web page is changed to a web page of an advertiser.
Media companies that own advertising media include those that sell a part of their advertising space inventory to advertisers while consigning the sale of the rest of the advertising space inventory to advertisement providers, and those that consign the sale of all of their advertising space inventory to advertisement providers, for example.
When a posting price of advertising content is determined on the basis of a bid price and advertising effectiveness (e.g., click-through rate (CTR)) specified by advertisers, for example, the profit of a media company from the advertising space may vary depending on whether a distribution source of advertising content (hereinafter, described as an advertisement distribution source) is the media company or an advertisement provider. Furthermore, when the sale of all the advertising space inventory is consigned to a plurality of advertisement providers, the profit of the media company may also vary depending on which advertisement provider is defined as the advertisement distribution source.
For a media company, it is desirous to maximize the profit from the advertising space, and thus the selection of an advertisement distribution source is desired to be conducted appropriately. Consequently, a technology that estimates effective cost per mille (eCPM) for each advertising content and selects an advertisement distribution source on the basis of the estimated eCPM has been developed to improve the profit of a media company (see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2012-093796, for example).
With the technology described in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2012-093796, however, an advertisement distribution source may be selected in an unbalanced manner for some users, and in such a case, profit estimation may become difficult for advertisement distribution sources not selected for those users. Thus, an improvement in profit from the advertising space concerning those users may not be achieved.